Using Video to Drive More (and Better) Sales Conversations

What's Certinia?

Certinia delivers the No. 1 professional services automation (PSA) and the only customer-centric enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool. Certinia accelerates business value with comprehensive best practices and the most intelligent analytics—all on the leading business cloud platform from Salesforce.

Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco, Certinia is backed by Advent International, Salesforce Ventures, and Technology Crossover Ventures.

Going Beyond ‘Duct-Taped’ Solutions to
Drive More Marketing Value from Video Views

The world of marketing is all about trial and error, and A/B testing lies at the heart of it. Marketers constantly ask themselves the question: What content or combination of messages will entice a new prospect to fill out a form or progress to the next stage in the sales cycle?

The marketing team at Certinia is no different. This team of marketing operations and revenue marketing professionals are responsible for bringing leads into the sales funnel, qualifying them, and nurturing prospects who aren’t quite ready to buy.

While the team is small in size, the mandate to drive quality leads and get them to the sales team at the right time is big. So the team uses a combination of technologies, including Marketo, Salesforce, and Vidyard to streamline processes, track and score responses, and drive marketing campaigns with maximum efficiency.

Over the last few years, video has become an increasingly important medium for Certinia. The organization’s video content includes webinars, recorded webinars, customer testimonials, and product tours. Visitors to the company’s website are invited from the home page to watch product demos. These short product vignettes have become one of the most important tools in the FinancialForce marketing team’s arsenal.

“By far our most popular assets are the two-minute tours. They are easy for prospects to digest and access because we only require a small amount of information in our Marketo form. They introduce different aspects of our product and showcase its capabilities, such as financial management or service management,” says Michaleen Craig, Digital Analyst and Front End Developer for Certinia. “Then, because we have Marketo running in the background, a prospect is free to rewatch that video without re-registering.”

Prior to adopting Vidyard’s enterprise video management platform, the Certinia marketing team used an in-house developed script on their website that allowed a visitor to un-gate a video asset and, then via a cookie, rewatch it as many times as they wanted. “It was a duct-taped, homegrown solution,” admits Michaleen.

While the video appeared on the Certinia website, the content was externally housed on Vimeo and YouTube. So the marketing team was unable to tie a contact to the view, see how much of the video a prospect actually watched, or advance that prospect to the next stage with a call to action. It was also impossible for the team to track the performance of a video asset across separate marketing channels, for instance, if it was used in a direct email campaign pushed out by the revenue marketing team.

Video Drives 40% of Sales Conversations

Certinia’s marketing team is just getting its feet wet using Vidyard’s video management platform. That said, video now drives 40% of sales conversations every week and the team conservatively estimates conversion from video content on the company’s website has increased by 2 to 3% since implementing Vidyard.

“We can now see which videos are performing best, which ones are attracting the highest percentage of views, which videos are watched most often, and which ones are watched in full. We can correlate that information with the length of videos, and we can consistently see the drop off points. For instance, we now know our product tours average an 89% completion rate and we are able to identify 96% of people who watch those videos,” says Michaleen. “This tells us what content we need more of, how to best construct that content, and what content is driving the best return on investment (ROI).”

There’s still more room to grow for Certinia when it comes to maximizing its use of video as a marketing tool.

“We’re planning to take advantage of the annotations feature and secondary CTAs to accelerate leads through the marketing funnel. And our revenue marketing team is looking forward to crafting new touchpoints on a program or video basis,” says Bobby.

For instance, for paid media campaigns, he explains, that Certinia is planning to send users to branded Vidyard sharing pages with custom offers, allowing the team to get second or third conversations with prospects, and more mileage out of the marketing dollars invested.

“We’re very excited to explore the full potential of Vidyard.”